All about the English-language editions of Marcel Proust's great novel,
À la recherche du temps perdu, once known as Remembrance of
Things Past but now more accurately titled In Search of Lost Time

READING MARCEL PROUST

(In Search of Lost Time, with special attention
to the translations from Penguin/Viking and the new editions from
Yale University Press)

The Guermantes Way is on its way!

Yale University Press has now delivered Volume Three of its freshened-up
edition of Scott Moncrieff's translation of Á la recherche du
temps perdu, as edited and annotated by William Carter. I've
read the first two volumes in this series, and they are wonderfully
well done. (I'm still fond of the "Penguin Proust," seven fresh
translations by seven different authors from three countries, though the
last three are still blocked in the US because of our Mickey Mouse copyright
law.) The Yale editions are large-format paperbacks, so Mr Carter's
notes appear on the same page as the text and fairly close to it. Scott
Moncrieff's post-Victorian diction has of course been updated, usually to
our benefit. The volumes are appearing at two-year intervals,
with this one available for
pre-order at Amazon stores, with delivery on November 20. (Don't buy
the e-book, and don't accept Amazon's offer to deliver the three volumes
in a single package. Jeff Bezos may be the World's Richest Man, but he
seems quite unable to understand that there are four different translations
of Proust's masterpiece.)

I am lucky enough to have an advance copy of
The Guermantes Way but I'm afraid it will be a while before I report
on it. Among other distractions, I have resolved to read Mr Carter's
translations while following his online tutorial. With thirty lectures and
heaps of supplementary material, it's the equivalent of a university-level
course, and the tuition is only $200 for a lifetime's enjoyment of it. See
the Proust Ink website
for more information.

How my project began

I ventured onto Swann's Way two or three times before a pal
challenged me to read the whole of the novel with him. Every Wednesday
on his way to the law office where he was a low-level attorney, he would
stop by my rented room (it had a kitchen and bath but wasn't really an apartment). We would
drink coffee, smoke(!), and talk about Proust. Egging each other on in this
fashion, we both finished the novel before the year was out.

Ten years later, I read the novel again—and aloud—to my wife
over the course of two winters. (One of the French deconstructionists,
arguing that one can't just study a novel by itself, because it's
a collaborative venture between the author and the reader, cinched
his case by pointing out: "After all, who has read every word of
À la recherche du temps perdu?" It pleased me hugely
to be able to say, if only silently, "I did!")

That was the handsome, two-volume Random House edition
of the novel, entitled Remembrance of Things Past,
the first six books rendered into English by Charles Scott Moncrieff and the
seventh by Frederick Blossom. (Scott Moncrieff died before finishing his task, which is probably
the reason Penguin decided to employ seven different translators
for its 21st century Proust.) When Kilmartin's reworking came out in
the 1990s, I acquired that, too, but only read pieces of it—notably
book seven, The Past Recaptured, greatly improved over the rather
lame Blossom translation. Otherwise, however, Remembrance of Things
Past was still hobbled by the post-Victorian prose of Scott Moncrieff.

Then came the new Penguin editions, the first four volumes of which
have now been published in the U.S. by Viking. After reading a rave review
of vol. 2—In the Shadow of Young Girls in
Flower—I realized that I would have to read it.
On second thought, I decided to start from the beginning with the new Swann's Way.
It was a good decision. Lydia Davis did a wonderful job with the first
volume, and by the time I'd lulled Little Marcel to sleep (on
page 43 in this edition), I knew that I was once again in for
the long haul. So I set out to acquire a complete set of hardcover
books—not so easy, as matters turned out! I read them
in sequence, and I have reported on them here.

But why bother?

The French sometimes boast that they have a Shakespeare for every
generation, or at least for every century, while we Anglophones must stick
with Will’s originals. Well, now we can say the same about Proust!
(And indeed it may not long be true about the Bard, for the Oregon
Shakespeare Festival has commissioned the translation into of his
thirty-nine plays into modern English.)

Beyond that, I've seen it argued that literary French has changed little
over the past hundred years, while English most certainly has, under the
battering of such writers as James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. (Whatever
you say about Charles Scott Moncrieff, he probably never read Ulysses
and he certainly was unfamiliar with the noisy young journalist who stormed
into Paris in 1921.) However that may be, it's nice to have a freshened
version of Proust's prose, and one that arguably is closer to the original
than the one rendered by Scott Moncrieff in the 1920s.

(Proust, Joyce, and Hemingway! It's pleasant to think that my three
favorite writers once breathed the same air in Paris.
Indeed, Joyce and Proust once met at a party ... and
had little or nothing to say to one another.)